Sport: New Wings

The strange, graceful birds, fashioned of metal tubes and plywood or canvas, were again hovering over Orlinghausen Field, a heather-dotted plot of land in Westphalia which most Germans know well. There Germany took to the air in gliders, after the World War I victors had decreed that the conquered must not fly powered planes. There future pilots came to train, in a kind of Luftwaffe kindergarten. After World War II, the victors prohibited flying again, but lifted the ban on gliders two years ago. Last week Orlinghausen was the scene of Germany’s first postwar gliding championships.

Some 50,000 German fans seemed as enthusiastic as ever about the flyers whom the father of modern gliding, Germany’s Otto Lilienthal, used to call “the birds’ apprentices.” Since the lifting of the allied ban, 840 gliding clubs have sprung up in Germany. Average age of the Orlinghausen meet’s 25 pilots was 39½.

One day last week, as on every morning of the 16-day meet, the race committee mulled over what contests the winds would permit—speed or distance contests, round trips, one-way flights or triangular-course races. The committee decided on a 62-mile triangular route. Into his French-built Air 102 glider stepped a foreign contestant, France’s youngish (25) Gerard Pierre. As he checked his instrument panel, ground crewmen raised his single-wheeled craft’s grounded wingtip and clamped a tow cable to its fuselage. Nearly a half-mile downwind, a 115 h.p. winch roared up and began to reel in the long steel cable, slowly at first, finally at a screaming speed.

At a steep angle, Pierre was drawn aloft. He let loose the cable when the Air 102 had climbed hundreds of feet above the field. Skillfully flitting from updraft to updraft, he zigzagged and roller-coastered around the triangle. He sewed up the grand championship for himself by whooshing the distance at an average speed of 35.8 m.p.h., a French record for his class of glider. Unable to speak German, Pierre grinned his gratitude on being awarded the top trophy. “Pierre is an excellent and very clever flyer,” said Germany’s Runner-Up Ernst Haase. Then he added thoughtfully: “And we are a little out of practice.”